But presidents can’t magically raise productivity it reflects too many forces: research, improved schools, better management, entrepreneurs. Productivity - efficiency - was the next largest contributor. Statistically, they explain slightly more than a quarter of the Democratic-Republican gap.
They occurred in 1973 (Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford), 1979 (Jimmy Carter but affecting Ronald Reagan’s first term) and 2008 (George W. Global “oil shocks” - steep increases in prices, which depressed economic growth - were the largest, because they hurt Republicans more than Democrats. Their conclusion: About half of the Democrats’ advantage reflected “good luck” - favorable outside events or trends. So if presidents didn’t do it, who or what did? Blinder and Watson march through economic studies. Most economists, they note, doubt presidents can control the economy. “Democrats would no doubt like to attribute the large growth gap to macroeconomic policy choices, but the data do not support such a claim,” they write. More interesting, Blinder and Watson don’t credit the Democratic advantage to superior policies. Not surprisingly, one of the report’s authors is a well-known Democratic economist, Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve now at Princeton the other author, Mark Watson, also at Princeton, is a highly regarded scholar of economic statistics who describes himself as nonpartisan. Jobs, stocks and living standards all advanced faster under Democrats. From 1949 to 2013 - a period when the White House was roughly split between parties - the economy grew at an average annual rate of 3.33 percent, but growth under Democratic presidents averaged 4.35 percent and under Republicans, 2.54 percent. It’s a Democratic campaign consultant’s dream: a study from two respected academic economists concluding that, since the late 1940s, the economy has consistently performed better under Democratic presidents than Republican.